A Study on Impact of Displaying Depth on User Recognition to Virtual Information

Optical see-through head-mounted display (OST-HMD) presents virtual information as an overlay to the real world. User's capability to recognize the virtual information can be varied according the depth of the virtual information being presented, as well as its distance to user's vergence on a real object. However, there are still no study comprehensively investigate the impact of the displaying depth on user's recognition. In this study, we propose and conduct two experiments to explore how the displaying depth influences a user's capability to recognize information presented by an OST-HMD, and search for the optimal depth for displaying virtual information so that a user can recognize efficiently. A hypothesis can be made that a user's capability to recognize presented information by OST-HMD will be decreased with the displaying depth increasing, or with the increasing of discrepancy between vergence and depth. And this hypothesis was supported by the experimental result.